As generally known in the art, semi-automatic parking systems improve drivers' convenience by automating steering operations necessary to park vehicles. In line with drivers' increasing interest in parking assist systems, major car and component manufacturers are developing various types of parking assist systems.
When such a parking assist system is used to park a vehicle, it is inevitable to select a target parking location, i.e. where the driver wants the vehicle to be parked. Therefore, much study is being made to develop better methods for selecting such a target parking location.
Methods for selecting the target parking location include those using a razer scanner to recognize a vacant parking space, those using a network of an SRR (Short Range Radar), those using computer vision, those using a GPS (Global Positioning System) and a digital map, those relying on the driver's manual designation, etc.
A Prius IPAS (Intelligent Parking Assist System) has been developed by Toyota and Aisin Seiki in 2003 as a semi-automatic parking assist system in which drivers manually designate the target parking location.
Methods using computer vision are recently drawing much attention, because they can show drivers images regarding how vehicles are parked. These types of methods are classified into those for recognizing nearby vehicles, those for recognizing parking slot markings, and those for recognizing both nearby vehicles and parking slot markings. Nico Kaempchen has developed a method for recognizing a vacant parking space by identifying nearby vehicles on a stereo vision basis. Jin Xu has developed technology for recognizing parking slot markings based on monocular vision that relies on neural networks.
Another system has recently been developed to recognize parking slot markings based on stereo vision while considering nearby vehicles. Aisin Seiki is also developing technology for stereoscopically recognizing nearby vehicles by using motion stereo and for providing drivers with images from an easy-to-understand viewpoint based on IVR (Intermediate View Reconstruction) through the parking process. Although these technologies aim at recognizing a parking location more accurately and quickly, they have drawbacks as well as advantages.
Therefore, it is requested to develop parking slot recognition technology for recognizing a target parking location more accurately and quickly solely based on drivers' simple operations.